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n7punk · 3 years

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strange disease Fic Notes

strange disease is complete as of today! I have a bunch of notes, but I’ll be posting more meta in the days before I start my next fic, so check back with this post for links at the end.

Post-fic summary:

I kind of did this in the epilogue, but Adora officially proposed to Catra shortly before Glimbow’s wedding. I specifically didn’t include it in the fic because I didn’t want to spend the time explaining knotwork proposals again right there at the end for anyone who hasn’t read my fics before. They did a courthouse wedding a few weeks later.

Adora got steadily better at controlling her shifting as time went on, getting a job at Scorpia’s tea shop to ease her transition back into society before eventually becoming a member of the community outreach team at the coven. Catra continues to work at the bar, because she does rather like the work.

Catra steadily gets things like furniture and a will to live, both over the course of the story and continuing on afterwards.

Lonnie continued to see Catra in passing at the Moon Rituals. After several months they were able to really talk again, even if they never see each other outside of the rituals.

Scorpia and Perfuma had just started dating at the start of the fic, and Catra finally meets her a few weeks after the confrontation with Shadow Weaver.

Shadow Weaver and Hordak rot in prison.

DT has to occasionally put on a more “palatable”/marketable show than they want to in order to keep the theater running, but they do okay for themselves, and sometimes Scorpia and Perfuma go on dates to the shows. Catra and Adora went once and Catra swore never again (It was of M. Butterfly. You can guess who DT played. Also the Wikipedia summary of M. Butterfly is disgraceful).

Songs for this AU:

25 - The Pretty Reckless, My Body is A Cage - Peter Gabriel, Decode - Paramore, Wolf Like Me - Lera Lynn, Supernatural - Legs Occult, And So It Went - The Pretty Reckless, Star Maps - Aly & AJ.

Chapter 1: A wolf at the door

This AU was supposed to be like 4 chapters and 20k.

Yes, I know, alright. Listen, it was supposed to be a thin veil of a set up and then smut. Somehow it grew a plot which then eclipsed the smut.

The quote from the fic description is from a scene that got cut in the initial draft of the fic with no backstory. I didn’t realize until after I started posting that the scene was cut and was like “well I can add the line back in later”.... I never did that.

Catra randomly remembered the encounter at the grocery story literal months later and sat bolt upright in bed, shouting WAIT A MINUTE. Adora was like babe, please, sleep? but Catra started interrogating her on whether that was her, the answer to which was of course yes. Catra fell back to the mattress, covering her face with her hands and groaning, because they were so close.

When I was writing this chapter, the fighting thing just popped up (originally it was street fighting) and then somehow that became the plot of the fic. This is why I have no answer to what my writing process is: there isn’t one. Every project is different.

I suppose I should admit the truth behind the broken mugs thing. Catra has mugs with letters and logos on them... Adora was stealing them out of the sink and trying to spell things out with them, but she is a big dog with powerful jaws, and also didn’t have nearly enough letters to spell out anything comprehensible. Melog kept looking at what Adora made, finding it incomprehensible, and putting the mugs back (broken or weakened so they subsequently broke in the wash) so Catra wouldn’t be bothered by the mess and get snappy with Princess.

Interlude I:

My concept with the interludes was to fill in gaps that were created by the limited perspective of telling the fic from only Catra’s point of view. Usually I accomplish this through communication, but seeing as Adora is a dog for parts of the fic, I decided interludes would help to cross the barrier. I also used them when it came to fights because I felt Adora’s wolf narration voice was best for them.

Adora picked up on the lingering scent of Catra by the deli, even in human form, but she didn’t really have sensitive enough senses to understand it, so it just hit her with a wave of terrible longing and caused her to shift back.

Chapter 2: Poltergeist

I’ll talk more about this in the original concept section below, but I wrote chapters 1 & 2, rewrote them, continued onto chapter 3 where the story grew more plot, and then had to rewind to heavily edit chapters 1 & 2 to reflect the new storylines. Chapter 2 was initially supposed to start with Adora changing back and then be about her explaining her situation to Catra and them beginning to date, with Chapter 3 pure smut, but obviously things changed.

I find the phrase “make love” cheesy usually (as does Catra, Adora doesn’t mind it though), but there was no other way to describe what they did on their first night together, much less what they would go on to do in chapter 4. Outside of that, they both usually just call it sex.

DT recognized Adora as a direwolf because they tend to be larger and have far more magic than the normal werewolf. They are extremely rare (in fact, Adora is one of the last), so few people know enough to recognize one, but DT is a shapeshifter and makes studying the various forms they could take a hobby. They had also played a direwolf in a play before. They weren’t 100% certain Adora was one in the first meeting, but the odds were in their favour. Catra just thought they were making a reference to movies (which direwolves show up in occasionally, usually inaccurately as a werewolf/sorcerer hybrid and played by a werewolf) when they said it.

Adora had tried a few small and subtler ways to signal herself to Catra before the store window jersey attempt, but they were just as unsuccessful.

Yeah, we know it now, but Catra was waking up from a nightmare about killing Lonnie again. It’s one of those things where Catra doesn’t want to blame herself because she knows it was never her intention, but the trauma is still there.

The magicat memory thing comes from my longstanding headcannon that Catra has an eidetic memory, but I also was thinking that different species would probably encode memories in a different way, leading to their species as a whole handling recall differently.

Interlude II:

There wasn’t supposed to be an interlude here at all, but SOMEBODY had to start talking about wolfdora getting a puppochino, and then I couldn’t be stopped. Somehow plot still snuck in with Adora’s reaction to Darla hinting at her overall condition being issues with light and dark magic, but for the most part this was a bit of wolf fluff before Adora was human for a few chapters.

Catra licks (human) Adora for a variety of reasons, but she also has a cat tongue that is small and dry in comparison with wolfdora’s. Catra wants to have no part in her dog slobber and has no problem being a hypocrite.

Chapter 3: I loved you

God, this chapter. I wrote it back in December but was still editing it up until posting. I’m really proud of it, it has a few lines that I really like and showing Catra’s wild emotional responses was something I really wanted to do, but it took a lot to get there. It is my fav chapter in the fic though.

I was laughing when I put this chapter up and people were talking about love breaking the curse, meanwhile Catra had just gone to bed mostly naked.

Melog didn’t know who Adora was. What is in the fic is all they knew - someone lonely, searching for someone else to understand them. Melog’s psychic abilities are pretty limited just to their bonded partner, so the most they could pick up from Adora was her general aura, body language, and scent signals. The two of them can communicate pretty well, but complex ideas and exact words can’t get across.

People also jumped on Adora maybe getting an undercut, but that really was just a Chekhov’s gun for the consent check in the next chapter. I wanted Adora to have her half-down hair from Noelle’s fanart for this fic. Adora with long hair up top and an undercut is actually part of my post-series headcannon for her, but Adora with totally short hair baffles me given how much she cares about her and She-ra’s hair in canon. It is completely out of character in my opinion (also, you can be GNC and have long hair.... Adora having long hair doesn’t break that headcannon).

The reason Adora is so willing to work towards forgiveness/so understanding of Catra needing assurance is a) she’s a good egg and b) she feels guilty as shit about it. She thinks she has to do everything possible to work towards forgiveness and this whole thing is her fault, which feeds into her emotional imbalance and isn’t helping her control her shifting overall, as is explained a bit in chapter 7.

In the comments of this chapter, one person nailed the reason for Adora’s lycanthropy exactly, which was exciting because it meant even with false-positives being thrown out people were getting a handle on where I was heading with that.

Interlude III:

This was supposed to be a smut interlude, but writing first times is also a very special challenge that I Keep Having since I do so many AUs, and since I had already kind of “skipped” that problem in this AU, I decided to focus more on the entire day and their relationship/love than the sex itself. The point of the interlude was to show more of their backstory, as well as show Adora’s bursting emotions leading up to her shifting.

(There were also some False Clues in there with the several hours until the moment Adora actually turned 18, but I can’t make things too easy for you guys).

I joked a bit before that sex-activated lycanthropy was not a wrong theory, but what I was really referring to there was how Adora was bursting with light emotions after getting to pour out her love by making love to Catra, which helped to trigger the shift that night.

This interlude is also when I introduced the custom skin for the work that hid the chapter numbers because the interlude’s totally ruined the numbering. Depending on your settings you may need to manually turn it on for each chapter with the “Show Creator’s Style” button at the top of the page.

Alright, we gotta talk about comments. Never, in all my fics, have I ever been inundated with “MORE” and “You better be updating soon!” comments like I have with this fic. It was driving me crazy because I was coming off of some major burnout from the daily fic advent I had been doing leading up to New Years. It felt like people were demanding I do more work, for free, for them. I literally cannot write more than I do and still function as a person. I felt like I was being taken advantage of. Many of the comments were lovely, but when I saw someone comment saying something like “I hope you read all of these comments and see how amazing you are!”, meanwhile I was feeling utterly disregarded as a person by the comments and actually considering turning them off, I knew I had to change things. I have always read every comment and I always will, but between the demands and carefully reading every comment looking for something I could reply to, I felt like they were taking over my mental headspace and stressing/depressing me. I considered locking the fic, but considering I already limit comments to logged-in users, I didn’t think that would really help. Eventually I came to the conclusion of not replying and placing that author’s note explaining the situation as briefly as I could. Did I get way fewer comments on that chapter? Yes, but they didn’t make me feel like shit, so I don’t care.

Chapter 4: To be human

This is another of my fav chapters in the fic just because I’m really proud of how emotional the smut came out, and I find Adora’s praise situation hilarious.

The Arid Plains (where the Silver Raiders rose up) are the Fright Zone. It’s just my headcannon for what the scorpioni kindgom was called, as we were never given an official name to my knowledge.

I was holding onto the “Praise Kink as a Plot Point” tag for so long waiting for this chapter to go up. I was so excited for it.

Adora actually shifted back before Glimmer even texted Catra her first update, but Glimmer waited until she thought Catra was at work to tell her because she didn’t want Catra thinking they were hurting Adora. In reality, it was just the general distress of the whole situation and Adora’s lack of control over her shifting.

Adora telling Melog “I’m glad you still like me” is something the clung through from the very first draft of chapter 2, back when Catra and Adora didn’t know each other. Adora, upon waking up, said “Oh, you fixed me.” in that draft. Catra was wary of the hot stranger in her bed, but Melog had no problem with crawling into Adora’s lap and purring. In the final version, once Adora finally had hands again, Melog immediately wanted Adora to use them for pets. They also were bringing her toys to make sure she would still play with them even if she wasn’t a wolf anymore

I never wanted to know this much about how long people have sex, but I will say I did point out Scorpia was overreacting about the timeframe, and that she’s also a virgin and in shock lol.

Chapter 5: The fight

Threading the needle between hinting at what happened with Lonnie (mentioning her several times, especially the nightmare Catra had about hurting her) and making it so that when she appeared and it was still a reveal that she was undead was one of the hardest parts about this fic.

I would be Highly Uncomfortable with killing off a POC, especially one that doesn’t die in canon, and figuring out when and how to post things while maintaining suspense and also not making it seem like I was doing that was a big challenge with this and the next chapter. I considered posting them back-to-back, but that also would have been a lot of editing to do at once, so we ended up with the gap. I was really worried how people would take Lonnie’s situation in this fic. I even considered switching it over to someone else, but I had already started posting the fic at that point, and with Lonnie being a shifter she was the only one that really made sense because she could be mentioned and name-dropped in relation to Adora’s shifting leading up to her actual debut.

Lonnie was supposed to appear more in the fic after becoming a lich and in fact be part of the final confrontation, but then in Chapter 6 she ended up putting her foot down on seeing Catra so she fell away from the story.

Interlude IV: The Fight

This was intended to be the last interlude in the fic, kind of capping off the uncontrollable wolfdora saga. I had this vision of them all collapsing around Scorpia’s shop (that was later changed to her backroom flat because wolves and health code violations) and Adora befriending Emily while the others did some exposition on what the hell was going on.

Catra is not the one who killed Octavia. She took out her eye in a fight, Octavia “recovered” (as much as one can), and then she died after getting in the ring again too soon to learn to accommodate her new blind spot.

Adora could immediately smell and recognize the necromancy, and Scorpia knew Lonnie was dead, but Glimmer was in the dark as to what was going on until Catra said it.

Yes, Emily does have a crush on Entrapta, but also she just wanted to be around her since she was highly connected to spirits as a Valkyrie.

Chapter 6: Immortality

This chapter was another really tough one to write, requiring a lot of editing. I had no intent of there being anything horny in it, I was going to give the fight some room to breathe on that one, Adora just got insecure and then Catra decided there was one solution to that. And then that insecurity transferred to Catra.

The deathmark was placed upon Lonnie by fate during her battle with Catra. She died and the mark was fulfilled, but upon being revived it flared back to life somewhat. She would have taken years to wake without its removal, though with the coven’s help they would have figured it out soon after.

Entrapta does give off ghostfucker vibes, and she is very happy with Darla and Emily now.

Scorpia absolutely saw them making out against the car and was Vaguely Concerned but also once she established Catra was enjoying it quickly looked away.

Chapter 7: Lycanthropy

Initially the explanation of Adora’s situation was supposed to be in Chapter 6, but Chapter 6 was also supposed to span over into Sunday before Catra got horny.

Adora’s mother was a direwolf (and stay-at-home mom) while her father was human. Her mother’s eyes were unusual, and she wore sunglasses for her own safety at most times (This was the only way Catra remembered seeing her). As Glimmer explained, Marlena legally identified simply as human for her own safety in the hostile climate of the Silver Raids, and identified Adora the same way when she was born. She planned to homeschool Adora until Randor could find a job that allowed him to move out of their largely-human town and into a folk village in the Whispering Woods. They would stick out a lot as being human-passing, but there was nowhere else safe for Adora to grow up once her shifting began, and once they had a wild wolf child they would have been accepted by the community (and never faced physical violence from them at least, even if they would have dealt with derogatory comments beforehand).

This fic really is, at its core, about loneliness, isolation, acceptance, and balance/burnout (which is part of why those comments were bothering me). Adora generates a lot of light magic, true, but her inability to balance give with take (light with dark) is what really led to her difficulty shifting. Adora’s entire saga of learning to control her shifting is, at its core, about learning to be “selfish” and put yourself first sometimes.

Chapter 8: Moon Ritual

Adora was having some difficulty being verbal (the pathway between her brain to her mouth was struggling as her more animalistic side came out) during the morning/smut, but she was fully capable of consenting. She gets her brain’s wires a bit crossed after shifting/while holding back a shift, but she is still herself.

It took a long time for Bow to show up in this fic, but he is a researcher/kinda legal aid for the coven that helps them with research/finding precedent for their legal campaigns. He was initially present in the lab in chapter four, but it made that scene too crowded when there was already a lot of explanation going on there, and it would have been odd for him to be at the coven so late in the day, so I removed him until later.

The woman in the frilly pink dress was Spinnerella, and yes she is a necromancer in this AU. Oops.

There used to be “smaller” Moon Rituals insular to individual species (such as werewolves, as mentioned in relation to Adora’s den), but as the coven’s rose up as centralizing political and community entities, most of them got absorbed into their local coven’s Moon Ritual.

Liches’ bodies must be carefully maintained, or they either will a) remain in the exact same state as they were upon death (this takes a skillful transition, which Lonnie’s was not) or b) have their flesh and guts rot away even as their heart continues beating and they become living skeletons with an exposed heart. The ritual Glimmer, Castaspella, and Angella perform is three-fold: it “unlocks” Lonnie’s body from preservation, ages it slightly, and then “relocks” it so she doesn’t face any rotting issues. Lonnie will progress in her unlife until she is elderly, at which point another magical ritual can free her spirit and allow her to finally pass into a peaceful death.

Chapter 9: Echoes through time

Yeahhhhh Hordak was a Raider. He was trying to stake a vampire and the vampire bit him in self-defence. He tried to sell himself to Prime as being able to sneak into the folk villages because he appeared to be one of them - Prime returned that he was one of them, and then Hordak fled before he could be staked by his former comrades.

Catra fought Hordak when she and Scorpia were trying to get out. They started prodding about leaving, and he started giving them both vicious opponents trying to scare them off from leaving/kill them so SW could raise them as obedient ghouls but Catra could more than handle herself in the ring. It was when one of those violent matches injured Scorpia that she had enough and called a meeting with him in the ring. He basically told her no one ever walks away from him alive, to which she responded "We both know which one of us would die in a fight." They fought, she beat the shit out of him and told him they were done with all of this, warning him she would finish the job if he ever came after her or Scorpia. They weren't contacted again and they walked away from the underground.

Bringing my art history class in with this chapter, but I was envisioning something like a mini-Parthenon for the werewolf shrine. The shrine was never meant to be more than it was introduced as, an ancient gathering point for werewolves (also where the initial “cursed” willingly underwent the ritual to become a direwolf that didn’t go Quite as planed but shhhhh), and it merely acted as a memory trigger on wells of power for Catra.

Modern Etheria has "states" instead of countries, all under the national banner Etheria as a planet, though the national government doesn't actually do anything except coordinate between the individual states. Bright Moon started as a city-state. The Whispering Woods are legally part of Bright Moon, though they are in the in-between where a lot of people consider them their own folk state (kind of like Hong Kong is part of China, but people kinda acknowledge it as its own place) but everyone born in the Whispering Woods is a Bright Moon citizen.

Interlude V: Well of power

Basically, when I started posting this fic, I had it planned up to Chapter 5-6ish, and then everything was a blank road after that. When I reached chapter 6, what I had planned for that expanded out into Chapter 7, and then I was like well I need to show the moon ritual and full moon obvs, and how they found Shadow Weaver spun out from that moment. I had a rough vision of them finding out about Micah being taken/maybe raised in a dramatic graveyard scene, and then a rough sketch of the confrontation in the house afterwards with Micah landing the final blow.

Shadow Weaver didn’t know shit about direwolves aside from the very basics of what they were, so she never figured out that is what Adora was, but she anticipated her showing up after the fight between Hordak and Catra went bad. She knew Catra and Adora had broken up from word-of-mouth among the fighters, but she didn’t know the details and still assumed Adora would come to help her.

Hordak immediately let Catra into his cage fighters and threw her into the ring because as soon as Shadow Weaver found out the name of his new recruit, she wanted Catra under her control. Catra was supposed to die in a battle eventually, and Shadow could raise her as a ghoul and then use her to draw Adora into returning to her. She would have had to find Adora first, but that hurdle never came up considering Catra refused to die.

Chapter 10: Laid to rest

Alright, the truth about Melog: a few weeks after the end of the “continuous” part of the fic (the final Moon Ritual and smut), Catra finally asks Glimmer yo, what the fuck is up with my cat? Glimmer, like everyone else, doesn’t know, so she asks Angella and Castaspella. It turns out, Melog’s species adapts to their environment and mirrors their surroundings as they grow. No one recognized Melog because most of their kind are bipedal fae these days, mirroring humanity (roughly the same as the initial form we see them using in the show), but because Melog’s parents died early in the Silver Raids, they were raised by the forest and took on the form of a wild animal. Melog can affect their form somewhat, but they grew up quadruped and have no chance of becoming bipedal. Melog is happy as a cat, anyway.

Glimmer’s ritual, back when she did it, was performed after the moon ritual. The final step of the moon ritual would be Glimmer, Angella, and Castaspella drawing magic from the moon and gathering it in the crystals. Angella would give a brief explanation as to why each time in case there was someone new. Adora was well known at the rituals as the cursed wolf Glimmer was helping. Some people would hang back to talk with the coven leaders, but after the basin was mostly cleared out, Glimmer would take Adora behind the altar and perform the ritual to give her privacy. She provided Adora with clothes that were essentially scrubs - disposable and cheap, marketed towards new shifters as well as shifter and hybrid parents dealing with their children learning how to use their claws and not tear things.

This method preserved Adora’s privacy as much as possible, but any stragglers would see Adora walking with Glimmer, put together the blonde blue-eyed werewolf, and know it was Adora. Adora’s wolf form is far better known than her human one - at least before she started attending the ritual as a human occasionally - but her human form isn’t totally unknown.

Original Outline:

strange disease was supposed to be about 20k, 3-4 chapters, and have no backstory. Like my roommates AU, those plans changed. Originally, Catra was supposed to just be a bartender, and Adora was supposed to be a complete stranger. However, I’m never really a fan of AUs where they don’t at least know each other growing up in some way, and I lowkey swore I would never write one because they just don’t feel like Catradora to me. I wrote the first chapter of the fic with that lack of backstory (which at the time included some ideas/scenes from the final chapter 2 that later changed a lot), and - like always - it didn’t feel like Catradora to me once Adora shifted back (Adora’s situation was just that she got stuck shifting a lot and showed up at Catra’s place often, but she had her own apartment).

I went back to the drawing board, using the fighting backstory that had popped up to explain Catra’s home ownership while I was writing chapter one, and expanded it to the final fic’s backstory, although the details of why Adora had gotten stuck and everything to do with the necromancy didn’t come to me until later. I rewrote and edited the first 4~ chapters a lot as those ideas came to me, and didn’t start posting the fic until I already had those story elements in place.

Originally, Adora just befriended Melog and then fell for Catra, shifting back after staying the night because it was snowing. They started dating, there was some smut, and Adora got better control of her shifting when she became more stable from the relationship. That was supposed to be it. Oops. Additional meta:

Extra #1: Bestiary

Cut Content #1: Bar scene, Chapter 1

Ref #1 - Wolf shrine

What’s next?

I need fluff. After all that? It has to be fluff. Next is The Greys, my Area 51 AU about kid through young adult Catradora. I plan to start posting it in the next week on Tuesday.

#strange disease #ficmeta #ficnotes #fic originals

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